Highlights From the Archives

In these stories, Jhumpa Lahiri writes about Indian immigrants and their American-reared children with an intimate knowledge of their conflicted hearts, using her lapidary eye for detail to conjure their daily lives with extraordinary precision.

Q: In your first book, ''Interpreter of Maladies,'' and your new book, ''The Namesake,'' you write about Indian immigration and the difficulty of assimilating into American culture. But Indian culture has recently become very hip in the United States -- from films like ''Bend It Like Beckham'' to fashion to yoga. What do you make of that?

Although their voices are being heard much more loudly in the West than in India, some young writers are ushering in a new era for Indian literature in English. They are often called Midnight's Grandchildren in homage to another seminal Indian novel, Salman Rushdie's ''Midnight's Children,'' the dark parable of Indian history since independence that won the Booker Prize in 1981.

Jhumpa Lahiri, 33, who was born in London and raised in Rhode Island, won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction yesterday for her first book, a collection of stories evoking the isolation and disconnection of South Asian immigrants in America.

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In this installment of their India tour diary, the women’s rights activists Ruchira Gupta and Gloria Steinem are determined to make their presentation at the city’s literature festival an organizing meeting, not just a one-way speech.

From Friday through Tuesday, celebrated writers from India and abroad will talk about not just their books but also about the two World Wars, Afghanistan after the withdrawal of American troops, Himalayan languages and the making of modern China.

September 8, 2013, Sunday

A view of Rome, a pristine computer screen, a photograph of Basquiat, an I.B.M. 196c typewriter, the ghost of another author. For these writers — each of whom releases a new book this fall — all they need to inspire is within these walls.

March 22, 2012, Thursday

IN college, I used to underline sentences that struck me, that made me look up from the page. They were not necessarily the same sentences the professors pointed out, which would turn up for further explication on an exam. I noted them for their...